ABC Wednesday

U - is for Ubiquitous (meaning everywhere at once; omnipresent)

And when I think ubiquitous (not a pretty word) I immediately think Garden / Yarrow
/ Physilis (Chinese Lantern)/ couch grass / and to this motley crew I am this year forced to add the Sweet Violet who is everywhere at once, - along the garden path, in the midst of the Iris, the Peony, the Delphinium, the Shasta Daisy. The cruel winter that took the roses must have been kind to the violets - I have never seen them grow so tall, so bushy - great mounds of green leaves. And come to think of it, not many flowers in these overgrown plants. In the small violet plants, yes, - they were a delight in the early spring. But where have these ubiquitous violets come from?

Imported by the Yarrow, perhaps? What I have in my garden now is the common variety of yarrow, - the rather off colour white with the ferny leaves. In the lost Garden I had a rainbow variety of beautiful Yarrow, but here, alas - where the Chinese Lantern and the Violets leave room they crowd in every available space, - common and pushy and UBIQUITOUS...





The Coutch grass we take for granted, - it establishes itself at the base of a plant and then reaches slender stalks far above the cherished and cultivated plant, so that when you look at the garden with a photographer's eye, or a visitor's eye, all you see are waving spikes of coutch grass, like a cobweb on what you hoped was a pristine ceiling.

For a number of years I tried to establish the Chinese Lantern in my garden, but they turned their backs on me and shunned the rich loam. However, someone whispered in their ear 'ubiquitous - if you really try you can be everywhere at once'! And so they were, and are - - they have established an underground railway (of which I have spoken before in blogs) that details stations every few feet in the garden and from which passengers alight and push their way through to whatever space is available to them. And yeah, even across the road and field they send out branch lines!



These are the UBIQUITOUS - they come to stay, but they are only visitors. Their true home is in the wheelbarrow, and eventually the compost heap where they will be worth their weight in gold. And as I dispatch them to their rightful place I mutter, ubiquitous, ubiquitous......